The Kurobe City Art Museum in Toyama has opened the first major solo exhibition of Haruka Matsumoto, a 33-year-old artist whose unusual day job is courtroom drawing. Titled 'Image of You', the show runs until December 20 and gathers nearly everything the artist has made, from student works to pieces completed this year.

Born in Kyoto in 1993, Matsumoto studied printmaking at Kyoto Seika University and completed a postgraduate degree in painting at Kyoto City University of Arts. Her practice begins with observation and field research: she reads news stories, visits the places where events happened, and draws on her experience sketching trials as a courtroom artist. She then substitutes herself for the people involved, rendering the imagined scenes as finely detailed lithographs. The method has drawn growing attention — she won the excellence prize at 'Kyoto Art for Tomorrow 2025', the Kyoto prefecture's emerging-artist showcase, and a jury special prize at this year's third Kinutani Koji Art Prize.

The exhibition is organised in eight sections — 'Stories and Printmaking', 'News and Printmaking', 'The Courtroom and Printmaking', 'Industry and Printmaking', 'Daily Goods and Lithography', 'Movement and Printmaking', 'The Everyday and Printmaking', and 'Printmaking: Afterwards' — tracing how her territory has widened as her own circumstances changed. Handwritten captions beside works like 'Image of You (Yasu)' (2026) double as the artist's production notes, folding her research process into the display.

At its core, the show asks how strangers we have never met can be held in the imagination. By placing her own body into scenes drawn from courtrooms and news reports, Matsumoto tests what printmaking can know about people it can never directly depict.